The homosexuals with CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace.

Homosexuality is an emigmo.

Given in the era of bold sexual morays, it remains a subject that people find disturbing,

embarrassing, and the reluctance to discuss it, yet there is a growing concern about homosexuals

in society, about their increasing visibility.

We discovered that Americans consider homosexuality more harmful to society than adultery, abortion,

or prostitution.

Hi, I'm Annamarie Cox, and welcome to, with friends like these, Converts Edition.

Right up front, I need to offer a content warning for sexual orientation-based violence,

mental illness, and medical abuse.

As long as there's been homosexuality, there have been people who've been trying to eradicate

it.

That's Tom Wade-Zunas, a professor of history at Temple University and the author of

The Straight Line, how the French science of ex-G therapy reoriented sexuality.

For much of human history, cures for homosexuality were the province of religious leaders.

We went to religion to cure most things.

But as we in the Western world turned more and more to doctors and other experts for our

physical and mental health in general, those doctors turned to the tools of their trade,

aka science, to address the problem of homosexuality.

And that's the story we want to tell today.

There is a long and interesting and frankly disturbing story about the role of religion

in both the advocacy and practice of conversion therapy.

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